Well, it’s about time I sync my iPhone to my iTunes. Put some new ringtones on there, the new albums I picked up recently. Oh and of course I’ll have to reorganize my apps! Alright, here we go!
Trying to sync between computers
Wait…what? Oh…right. My iPhone is synced to my Mac. This is my desktop. I can’t have the files on my Mac synced with my desktop…
Wait what?! This is ridiculous! And perhaps one of the reasons I hate iTunes! As a prolific computer user, I have a lot of files that go on different devices. When I want them all in one place on my iPhone that’s almost impossible to do thanks to Apple’s deterrence against pirating. iTunes strictly disallows users from syncing their device up with different iTunes libraries on different computers. This means all of the songs/apps/videos on my Macintosh aren’t getting put on my iPhone alongside my Windows files. I have to pick between the two.
This may not seem like a huge deal but is a huge problem with the heuristic of user control and freedom. When I’m out on the town with my Mac in my bag, I may meet some friends who give me their USB with some new music on it. While I can easily add that to my laptop’s iTunes library I won’t be able to add it to my phone unless it’s synced with my laptop’s library OR I overwrite whatever it’s already synced too. More then once, I’ve lost precious data and files because I’ve had to switch computers or iDevices.
You’d think iTunes would implement some sort of cloud service so that your iTunes library is amorphous between multiple devices. That would be awesome! However the sync limitation was put in place to stop pirating and the distribution of DRM-free files. Well let me tell you, that really doesn’t work.
Credit to XKCD
DRM has always been a hot topic in the technology industry. I just hope Apple can find a better solution to this problem. Until then, I’ll just avoid using iTunes altogether. The only thing I have on my iPhone is apps and ringtones anyway.
Cloud computing has existed for a number of years but is only now beginning to gain widespread use. The most popular use of cloud computing so far is the various services that allow users to sync their files on the cloud which is usually a giant server tower somewhere in the Western Seaboard. These copies can then be accessed at any time from other devices that have the service.
Sugarsync is an example of this software. With Sugarsync, I can select any folder on any one of my devices and sync it to the Sugarsync cloud. I can then access that folder and it’s contents from any computer, through Sugarsync’s web platform or from it’s software bundle. If I have Sugarsync installed on multiple computers, the folders I synced will be available to me on any one of those computers. Editing files or folders will update every copy of the file in real time! Which is great since the major portable hard drive I used died recently, stymieing my ability to transfer files between my computers.
Now if I forget a file on my Windows desktop and I’m in my office on campus, I can still grab that file by logging in to the Sugarsync website. Or if I’m working remotely on my Mac and make some changes to a document, I don’t have to worry about updating it on my Windows desktop. Sugarsync does it for me!
Sugarsync’s Application UI
The best part of Sugarsync is that it follows the heuristic of visibility of system status. Sugarsynced folders have the little Sugarsync icon beside them that lets me know when it’s updating or is up to date which is a great stress relief. I know I’ve had a lot of “DOH” moments when I forget to put something on my USB or email something to myself. Now I don’t need to check that!
Now I don’t want to make this a commercial or anything but you might be wondering why I don’t just use Dropbox. Well Dropbox is free and gives you 2 GB, but I find that Dropbox is better for public use of sharing files. If I want multiple people to access a certain document that’s related to a project, I’ll make a folder in my Dropbox and dump files in there. More importantly Dropbox requires active updating as you need to throw things in to your Dropbox to reach them elsewhere. Sugarsync however is optimized for personal use and for ten dollars a month you can get up to 100 GB! Plus, even my tablet or phone can access it! Anyway, if your interested take a look at the Sugarsync comparison table and make your own decision. I personally use both for different reasons! Because space is important to me!
Sugarsync has been a really great product so far and it’s really helped me manage my two differing computers. As my friends may know, I use a Windows computer for most of my work and play and use a Mac to develop for IOS and to work away from home. My old hard drive wasn’t formatted for Mac and so I couldn’t transfer files between my two computers very easily at all! However, with the Sugarsync cloud, I’m all good.
Here are some blogs that I found interesting recently! Check them out at your leisure. I highly recommend them!
Cloud Computing
Colleague and good friend James He made a blog post about cloud computing recently. This is a very well timed post in my opinion as I will very soon be making a post on the subject. For those of you who haven’t heard of cloud computing though, you can check out James He’s blog here for a quick taste of what’s to come in the very near future from yours truly!
Karthik Sukumar’s two part blog on Spotify was born out of a conversation we were having about Itunes, or at least that’s what I’d like to think. While I may not be the inspirational figure for the series, it’s a really interesting set of blogs on a music distribution platform and maybe highly relevant to a blog about a certain mainstream music distribution platform I’ll be discussing very soon.
Josh Sarver is always posting about the most unique innovations in technology. Check out his post on the Lumbrella! It’s a conceptual design for a new smart umbrella that alerts you as you leave the house to take it with you in case of rain. This thing would be a lifesaver for me! I always forget my umbrella at home, especially on rainy days!
This semester the class has been working on projects in groups that have been taken from the conceptualization stage all the way up to the prototyping stage. The project for the group that I’m in is a content management system for small business owners called Busipress. Busipress’s goal was to help small business owners manage their business and their online presence. Busipress would achieve this goal by allowing small business owners to very quickly set up and maintain their own websites using the Busipress system. The system was meant to have little to no requisites in terms of coding.
In order to facilitate this and to eventually test the validity of the need for Busipress, our group decided to create prototypes. We first began with sketches.
Shows the main ideas for designing Busipress
The sketches were just meant to impart some basic design ideas and requirements for Busipress. We wanted to get an idea of what it should look like, what pages it needed. So the sketches were quite rough but gave a basic idea of what we wanted to see on Busipress. After that we created a storyboard that more cohesively tied our sketches together. We then created wireframes and this is where the magic really started.
The wireframe for the splash page
With our wireframes we created what the Busipress site would look like and what links would be on each page as well as the functionality on the major pages. In order to conduct our actual usability testing, we printed out these wireframes and took them to our sample population: the owners of small businesses in the local area. Sitting down with these business owners we had them flip through our giant stack of wireframes and give us their initial impressions on the web interface. We then gave them a task to complete in order to test the usability features of the site and then provided the test participants with a brief survey that we could collect qualitative data from.
I was really surprised how enthusiastic our test subjects were! The usability testing was very well received and Busipress concept seemed to be highly desired by our test participants. We also received some great feedback from our testing participants on major features of the site. All of our test participants liked the novelty of the drag and drop website builder.
The easy to use web builder
As we expected there were still some issues we had to address in terms of navigation and system status. But in general the feedback for Busipress was really amazing and to be honest it really got me hyped up for the project. It’s too bad that the scope of the class only took the Busipress concept to the paper prototype level. Maybe someday it would be interesting to see if the web platform we conceived is really as feasible and as innovative as we thought.
It was a fun project and I was happy to work with my team on it. Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!
An important feature of game design is communicating possibilities to the player. Especially in big open world games where the player is presented what seems like total freedom. In these cases it is hard to restrict the player or guide them and so game designers have to be clever in how they hint to the player what they can and can’t do in the game world. There are many great examples of this subtle art of suggestion in many modern videogames. But I’d like to point out what I think are some of the best examples of affordance in a very specific style of video game.
The sport of parkour, originating in France, has been increasing in popularity recently due to a revival of the urban exploration scene around the world. Freerunners to put it simply are acrobatic athletes who make an art out of traversing dense urban areas using the environment while maintaining as much momentum as they can. Affordance actually plays a big role in this sport because a freerunner has to use everything in his way as a means to reaching his goal. To a freerunner an obstacle becomes something they must surmount instead of bypass and these athletes look out for any part of a building, fixture or decorative hedge piece they can use to catapult themselves towards their goal. Check out the following video of parkour!
Now in the above video, the athlete is dressed as one of the main characters of the popular game franchise Assassin’s Creed. In the Assassin’s Creed series, freerunning plays a major role as a gameplay mechanic. The game series takes place in a historical setting where the player assumes the role of an assassin trained in the art of escaping pursuers by clambering up the sides of buildings, jumping across rooftops, swinging from poles etc. etc. The franchise has had settings in sprawling cities such as 12th century Jerusalem and late Renaissance Rome. These cities were lovingly replicated by the Ubisoft team and are huge sprawling urban landscapes.
What made the series stand out so much from other open world games was not just the setting but the fact that the player could scale anything with a protruding angle. That meant that if you could see it in the game and you could see some sort of handhold, you could climb to the top of it.
The Assassin’s Creed series is one of my favorite games because of this awesome depth of user control and freedom (which is one of Nielsen’s Usability Heuristics by the way!). But of course Ubisoft also made sure to give the players some hints in the game about what they could climb. The color white is a very important color in the Assassin’s Creed series. It has great significance not only to the story but also to the game world. The game designers filled the world of Assassin’s Creed with subtle objects painted or colored white to signify to the player starting points for freerunning segments. A stack of boxes with a white cloth over them led to a fast paced sequence of pole swings and acrobatic rooftop leaps. A pole painted white was the starting point to scale the side of an enemy castle. This affordance of white has been used consistently throughout the series, which now spans 6 games, not including spinoffs from the main series.
The use of color to signify something to a player is not a novel concept. It has been used before in videogames but one example that really stands out and is very serendipitous is another game about freerunning. Mirror’s Edge is a first person action game where the player assumes the role of a courier who uses her parkour skills to elude a tyrannical government. As Faith you must use the environment to navigate an urban rooftop environment and reach your goal.
Mirror’s Edge was lauded upon release for it’s innovative take on the action genre, using first person in a freerunning environment. Naturally the game was harder than Assassin’s Creed and much more hair raising. But just like how Assassin’s Creed uses the color white to signify affordance, Mirror’s Edge does the same thing with the color red. In the trailer above, as the player runs through the environment, objects turn red to let them know they can be used and to let them know they can be interacted with.
Both Assassin’s Creed and Mirror’s Edge are great examples of game designers creating games that challenge the player to explore the possibilities of their game world while giving them that little extra helping hand. Game designers use a consistent visual affordance throughout their game, and build a trust in the player and a truly enjoyable game experience.
I could go on and on about more games that use freerunning and affordance but there’s quite alot of them out there now! Assassin’s Creed and Mirror’s Edge were some of the forerunners in this genre and are archetypical examples. But other examples include the Uncharted series, Infamous and the newest reboot of the Tomb Raider series. Of course affordance in games doesn’t just stop at freerunning in open world games but also applies in almost any well designed game. The red barrels of death joke is a good one here. In almost any videogame where there are barrels colored red, the player instinctually assumes that they explode. It’s much more uncommon that red barrels in videogames DON’T explode!
Anyways, I hope you enjoyed my thoughts on affordance in videogames. Thanks for reading! Seeya next time!
Hello! Looking for some extra reading? Looking beyond my own blog, you might be interested in some of the specific usability heuristics that I sometimes bring up in my posts. Well have I got something for you! Fellow colleague and blogger, Spencer Edwards, is making a great endeavor to document each of Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics, one post each! He’s got some great posts already and has worked his way through the first 6 of the Heuristics. Here’s hoping he completes his set of 10 soon!
I really recommend that you take a look, get engrossed and read through the rest of his work! I remind you that this is the same guy behind “User First, Designer Second”. If that doesn’t give you a hint of how well he knows his stuff…well he’s great! So check it out, and come back very soon for the mystical blog post I’ve been working on for nearly a month! It’ll be worth it! I hope!
Not everyone may recognize Soren Johnson’s name but can probably recognize the influence of his works. Soren was the lead designer on the modern Civilization series of games, considered the definitive example of turn-based strategy in the game industry. He had a huge role in the creation of Civilization 3 and Civilization 4 but stepped away from position of designer when offered work on Civilization 5. Soren instead left Firaxis and joined up with independent game studios to work on other strategy games. His thoughts on game design in strategy games was a big influence for me as a game designer and as a result an influence on my thesis project: MAEGUS.
Soren was one of the minds behind the Civilization series
Soren Johnson’s blog Designer Notes is a log of his personal thoughts on the game industry and game design and is a really great read. One post that he made a few weeks ago really enlightened me. His post, entitled “I am Giving Up on Giving Up”, is a semi-biographical record of his work through the game industry and how he ended up founding a new independent studio, Mohawk Games. You can check it out here: http://www.designer-notes.com/?p=697
Game design is a very important part of game development. As I said in my Game Atoms post, it’s up to designers to balance a game’s design to appeal and engage the user. After completing Civilization 4, Soren didn’t believe he had enough input to make Civilization 5 compelling and so pulled away from Firaxis. That took real courage and humility and also allowed Soren to work on things that let him grow and eventually led to him founding his own studio. I’ve followed Soren Johnson’s work ever since Civilization 4 and I’ll definitely keep an eye on what he’s going to produce out of this new opportunity.
Ever heard of Designmodo? It’s a great resource for web designers that provides links and guides to making online content. Designmodo is a current and modern site that keeps up on innovation in web design and provides free content for deployment on websites. It also sells premium content such as templates and other plugins. It’s a great place to read up on what’s the current trend in web design and to help hone your skills as a web designer, if that floats your boat!
I was sitting around preparing our analysis of the data our group collected for our Busipress prototype when I was reminded of a really cool blog post by Shweta, a fellow student in CGT 512. Her blog post on Visual Analytics can be found here and is a refreshing take on the representation of datasets. IBM and Microsoft both seem to be making strides in engaging data representation and this new creative future for analytics looks really cool.
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